Blessed Are the Not Her
by Emma CS Me
Summary: Gia wishes she could be stupid like she once was, but she half-thinks that would cause yet another catastrophe, and then she'd have to feel guilty for wishing her knowledge away – and if there's one thing she could not stand more of, it would be guilt.


**BLESSED ARE THE NOT HER**

Sometimes she thinks about Neptune. She always tries not to, because the whole place was and is a ghost town, and everyone knows who she is there. She can never go back and she knows it – she doesn't want to go back. She wants to run as far away from that place as is humanly possible, and even then it won't be far enough.

She was always a sweet girl – kind of stupid (okay, she's still kind of stupid), but she was open and warm. People tended to half-like her, because even if she was kind of annoying, there was no real reason to dislike her. So she had a lot of people to hang out with, but no close friends. She was okay with that though, because she always thought her family – even though they were all either insanely weird, ordered or corny – were close enough to fulfill the role.

Ha. Freaking. Ha.

She wishes she could forget her father; cut him out of her mind like a tumor. What happened has changed her for good, and people always seem a little scared of her now – they look at her like she's broken. She hasn't told anyone what happened – she's not stupid – but she's overheard people theorizing on what made her the way she is (distant, untrusting, et cetera). Once, she eavesdropped on some people in the library talking about how she wouldn't talk about her family, and how she won't date or anything like that – the major theory that seemed to come out of that meeting was that she had been molested by her father. She was a good distance away, so she laughed into her palm; quietly so they wouldn't hear her. She laughed and laughed until she had to run to the bathroom to throw up.

When the best reason your father never touched you is that you weren't his type, it kind of proves that your life _is_ fucked up beyond all recognition. She threw up after everything had passed – Dad was dead, the paparazzi were swarming outside her house like flies to a turd – and they got the results back from the hospital, from the tests on Rodney. She wasn't even sure why she was surprised at that point, but she was – like he was meant to make an exception to being and Evil Sick Bastard (tm) for his family. He didn't, and eventually Rodney broke down and confessed everything – Gia had always blamed her brother's weirdness on her mother, but she was fast realizes she knew next to nothing about her family.

She hates them all; hates her father for the things he did, hates her mother for not knowing, hates her brothers for not telling them, hates everyone who didn't come forward in time, hates the people who _tried_ to come forward and got themselves killed, hates Lucky for his crazy stalking of her in revenge for what she didn't even do, hates Cassidy freaking Casablancas for everything he did (including her father's murder, irritatingly) and she hates herself a lot. Because she was an idiot, and maybe if she wasn't less people would have gotten hurt. Maybe all those people wouldn't be, y'know, dead.

She keeps expecting someone to track her down and seek righteous revenge for what her father did (directly or indirectly) to them. Lucky pulled that one on her, of course – God, she still has nightmares of that Iraqi knife, of the gun pointed at poor Wallace Fennel's face. Lucky hadn't looked at her like a person; he looked at her like the waste her father had cast off, and no possible morals applied as to how she should be treated. Sometimes, she agrees.

If that gun had been loaded, if Wallace had splattered red over the pavement – would that mean something different? The people on the bus had faded into the background, Cassidy was evil, and the innocent people of that plane were just white noise – but Wallace Fennel was loved and respected. She liked him when she met him. He was sweet. Would he have been a fresh, new wound; somehow making things even worse? _How_? Besides, between the death of Meg Manning, revealing someone she knew and liked as evil then making her see him kill himself, and having that same guilty torture her on the roof (y'know, before killing himself) hadn't her family done _enough_ already to Veronica Mars?

Maybe it wouldn't have mattered; just another death piled with the... what? Twelve on her conscience? People would cry for Wallace Fennel, but they had cried for every single person Cassidy killed – including himself, and a few had even cried for her father – although that was just her family, including, sickeningly, Rodney. She's sure all those boys must have cried for themselves too – she can't even think the things her father must have done to them, let alone name them. Those boys must have cried, because it would hurt and they would be scared and _God_, must it all be such a big deal that means that her whole life can be ripped apart in a second?

Her stomach lurches when she realizes what she just thought – it's disgustingly selfish and immoral; she realizes that. But she can't help but think the whole thing is decidedly unfair, because _she_ didn't do anything wrong, besides being an idiot. Her life would have fallen apart with or without the crash, the truth would have come out _somehow_ – those two boys didn't even _know_ her and they were planning to rip everything away. Greedy, selfish fucks who didn't care about anyone's lives apart from their own, or anything other than their revenge; bastards deserved to d-

_No._

She _can't_ let herself think that. She _can't_ let herself blame the whole mess on anyone other than the evil bastard she was unlucky enough to be related to – well, and Cassidy too, because he did all the actual killing of people. She's not going to be the selfish rich bitch who refuses to care that her dad was a _fucking pedophile_ because she's a whiny brat who doesn't know how to deal with reality. She's not going to think that way.

She wonders if, maybe, she'll run into someone who knows something – six degrees of separation, right? Like the cousin of one of those people on the bus, or one of the boys on the team that her father _didn't_ go after. She wonders if the people she used to know, before everything went to hell, will find her again – she keeps half-expecting Dick to track her down and kill her; it seems like something he would do. They had a thing once – nothing serious – and now she knows the truth about Cassidy, that seems sick somehow. It wasn't her or Dick's fault, but she can't help wondering how it must have felt, for Cassidy to see his brother running after the daughter of the man who had...

Sometimes she wonders, with a turning sensation in her stomach, if Cassidy would have thought her father did something to _her_. She's not sure. Apparently little boys really were Daddy Dearest's type, but she doubts he made that all that clear.

She hates Cassidy – because he killed all those people, because he killed her father _even if_ she isn't meant to care – but she can't help but feel sorry for him. Her father broke him and she'll admit it – one of the last things the guy ever did was blow her father to pieces; she thinks that says something about the situation. Sometimes she wonders, if he had more time, would Cassidy have gone after her in revenge the same way Lucky did? Honestly, his whole plan seems to calculated and cold for that – he wouldn't have cared one way or another for her. Cassidy was all about keeping the secret, and she was too dumb to know anything so she really wouldn't change that.

She kind of wishes she had another chance – to make everything different. To save those people on the bus, to save Cassidy, to save each boy he touched – hell, the more idealistic part of her wants to think she could have changed her father, _somehow_. It makes her physically sick to admit this, even to herself, but despite the things he did – to all those boys; to her brother, _his own son_ – her dad was still _her dad_, and she loves and misses him as much as she hates and is disgusted by him.

And he's dead now, so she can't really resolve things either way. All she's left with is an annoying memory. Thanks for that one, Beav.

She's so sick of this. Sick of asking herself a million questions when all she really wants to do is obliterate the entire subject from her mind. She wishes she could be stupid like she once was, but she half-thinks that would cause yet _another_ catastrophe, and then she'd have to feel guilty for wishing her knowledge away – and if there's one thing she could not stand more of, it would be guilt.

Or maybe it wouldn't work that way – maybe it was Neptune, town of the fucked-up scandal. God of the seas, after all, and she's pretty sure she drowned there.


End file.
